Oliver Dowden’s privatisation wheeze is surely a post-truth provocation
Last week, the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, opportunistically pretended to have bailed out a picturesque Cornish theatre that had, like most arts practitioners, received nothing from him. Also last week, Dowden was outlining his plans for privatising Channel 4 in a piece penned for the Times, hidden behind the paywall. Dowden’s favourite kind of policy announcement is the kind of policy announcement you have to pay for. So I snatched up the Times from my newsagent’s counter, the first hard copy I had read since it declared me “the world’s greatest living standup comedian” in 2018. Dowden’s words were reassuringly expensive, like luxury Stella Artois. My newsagent, Ranking Newsman the News Selector, remembered the old days when the younger me would buy every non-Guardian newspaper in his shop and methodically burn them in the council dog mess bin outside. He wryly remarked that a man gets more right wing as he gets older.
Dowden’s first two paragraphs were blandly plausible. Then he patronisingly cited I May Destroy You and It’s a Sin as examples of shows by public broadcasters that “hold their own”. But the subject material of these acclaimed dramas – race, gender, sexuality and rape – is exactly the kind of woke content commercially driven producers would historically not commission, content that Channel 4 was explicitly established to create. Indeed, 20 years ago, the anti-woke Daily Mail wrote that woke It’s a Sin creator Russell T Davies’s 1999 drama, Queer as Woke, proved woke television needed to be actively censored. Beck’s beer even withdrew its sponsorship of the woke series, as it has every right so to do.
